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Duskbreaker Card Review

This card became quite the rabble rouser from the very moment it was spoiled. Zalae went on record with his first impression and most professional players, as well as I, tend to agree with him. Excavated Evil is a constructed playable board clear in Wild and Duskbreaker is not only 1 mana cheaper, but leaves behind a 3/3 body as well. Make no mistake, this card is the best AoE card Hearthstone has ever seen. Not the most powerful – there are spells like Twisting Nether that can fully clear any board. Not the cheapest, either. But it hits all of the checks in all the right ways to make it one of Hearthstone’s most efficient cards. Three health is a sweet spot for aggressive decks, which is what you are looking to combat by using Duskbreaker. It is the reason Tar Creeper is such an excellent defensive tool and why Paladins often play Rallying Blade.

Obviously, the Area of Effect damage comes at the cost of having Dragon Tribal activated. This means that in order for Duskbreaker to see play, there must be a Dragon Priest deck to support it. Throwing it in a pure control deck with a smidge of drakonic value action won’t work. The lovely people over at /r/CompetitiveHS did the math for how many dragons you need in order to consistently activate Duskbreaker and unsurprisingly, it’s around 10 dragons total, including the wannabe-Hellfire itself. How likely is it for that deck to be a thing? Very, considering Dragon Priest is a deck even now (though relatively fringe) and recently, experts familiar with the deck have begun taking it toward a more control-oriented playstyle anyway. From that point of view, Duskbreaker fits right it. The fact that it’s a dragon itself helps further enable other dragon-matters cards, such as Drakonid Operative, Netherspite Historian and Book Wyrm.

But before we get too excited… we can’t even be sure that Dragon Priest will be a thing once K&C hits. Our old friend Highlander Priest is likely here to stay, especially after receiving potential new toys to play with, such as yet another “spell outlet” in Dragon Soul, powerful defensive alternatives such as Lone Champion and potentially yet unrevealed cards. As long as that deck remains strong, there will be little to no reason to play other decks if you are looking to play Priest. However, should the meta favor a more mid-range approach, Dragon Priest will be the deck of choice. Of course, there is a non-zero probability that a hybrid deck emerges, depending on how much Highlander Priest wants to give up in order to play Duskbreaker (because it really, really wants to). Elder Dragon Highlander? Here’s hoping!

This card is very well balanced because it needs a dragon deck to be activated. This is exactly what dragon preist needs !!! holy crap deals with aggro well a hellfire that spawns a 3/3. Aslo can trigger drakonoid operative and netherspite historian if in hand later in game. Between this and Hoarding dragon I think dragon preist as a control deck WITHOUT the inner fire combo is much more viable.

Trash tier card. It may look good at first glance, but is a trap. Dragon Priest is a midrange deck, which strives to preserve its minions, so why in heck would you play a card that goes against the very nature of priest and this style of play by destroying the board you’ve been working so hard to establish?

This card is good only against aggro, a dead choice in control and almost useless in midrange matchups. Is it good against Highlander Priest? No. Jade Druid? No. Big Priest/Druid? In your dreams.

Looking at it I only imagine the joke of Zoo locks playing with Hellfire. Dragonfire Potion was a good card only, because it spared your dragons at least and was big enough of a board clear at the same time, when you needed one. This is not even close.

I mean if the whole meta is just aggro, then yes it will see play for sure, but a meta has never been only aggro and you need to think about all of the decks you will face out there before you decide to put this card in your list.

Well, having played Dragon Priest a lot, I have never needed any other board clear aside from Dragonfire Potion and in some cases not even that. Priest focuses on value and high health minions, which is why the class is so annoying on the board.

If you can’t establish a board through tempo and value trades you lose anyway and that “Hellfire” dragon makes it so easy to deal with your board that even if you manage to set up a good one it will be gone in a flash against anything other than an aggro deck.

Wyrmrest Agent, Twilight Guardian and a few other cards in Wild shine due to their resilience and provide a way to create a sticky board and start winning on the board.

In Standard you have all the more reason to keep your creatures alive, because half of your deck dies to that effect and the other half, which has 4-6 health, cannot win you the game if it gets cleared out due to insufficient life. That is even more true if you are playing with Divine Spirit + Inner Fire.

I have played a lot of dragon priest, both the divine inner spirit version and a more control oriented version. I think that this dragon could be run in both of them depending on the meta. With all of these tempo, aggro and zoo decks, duskbreaker could provide that turn four board clear swing that you need to beat them. On the other hand it could end up a dead card in your hand vs control. Think of it as a hellfire that summons a 3/3.

Its a single card Auchenai/CoH combo that just leaves you with a higher stated body for less AoE damage, hardly game breaking considering priests two primary board clears are one that is dependent on 2 cards and the other that leaves a certain tribal tag on the board. (looking at you Cobalt Scalebane :/)

Will this compensate for the loss of Netherspite ? is dragon priest able to compete with infinite jades or infinite warrior ?
I think not.Priest has had an OP dragon already , Operative. These cards cannot carry the deck. You either have a tempo deck or a control that can go infinite (jades , warrior at the moment)
The only use of this card is in some form of highlander dragon priest.
People at blizz are not totally stupid.
This card is obviously broken at first sight.But it’s not.
As an individual card 5/5
As a priest card 3/5

Netherspite Historian will only be in Standard for as long as Jades are, and both are leaving in March or April, and Infinite Warrior (I’m guessing you’re referring to Dead Man’s Warrior) is far from a competitive deck at the moment.

As far as those match-ups go, I remember Mean Streets Dragon Priest having a somewhat to moderately favorable match-up against Jade Druid from the same period just because Dragon Priests leaned more towards aggro than control in those match-ups, something that slaughtered Jades during that period. The low cost high health taunts they now have just didn’t exist then. The bonus effects for holding a dragon always added at least half a mana to the card’s value with Blackwing Corrupter, Chillmaw, and Drakonid Operative having at least one and a half mana of extra value.

The Infinite Warrior Match-up should be heavily in favor of Dragon Priest seeing as the deck is a sort of Midrange-Tempo sort of deal, and Tempo decks could always use more cards. In fact, the worst match-up for Infinite Warrior are faster decks like Tempo Rogue, Secret Mage, and Midrange Hunter, and the best match-ups are against slow decks like Quest Mage and Control Warlock.

Also, you wouldn’t really want to play this in any sort of Highlander Priest as long as Raza and Kazakus are in standard. The deck currently doesn’t have room for the five or so dragons you’d need to use to constantly get the effect off.

For some reason i thought MSOG will not rotate out with expansions at least 1 year older.Well done to blizzard for that.Anyway.
Dragon priest was a tier 2 deck with a 2 mana 2/4 taunt , a 3 mana 3/5 , a 4 mana 3/6 taunt , a 5 mana that deals 3 damage , and all the support you can get.
I dont think suddenly a 4 mana 3/3 do nothing against other control decks or midrange decks will help.
Dragon priest during that era already had a good match up against aggro and even now still has.It is against midrange and control decks that it can’t deal with.
As for the infinite tier 3 warrior i suggest start playing it.it shits everything and the only reason it is tier 3 is because noobs can’t play it.

Dragon Priest during MSOG was a very strong deck, but most of the time Pirate Warrior would kill you unless you completely curved out with every taunt and AoE in the deck. However, I would agree with you that this card won’t be that impactful unless aggro becomes more widespread. But, I don’t think dead man’s hand warrior is a tier one deck that shits on everything. Raza Priest and Jade Druid both have extremely favorable matchups.

this is a good card and im happy dragon priest players are enjoying it but this card just makes me sad… the reason to that being that this pretty much proves that dragon suport is now becoming priest exclusive outside of wild… one thing that made me really happy about dragons during blackrock was that there was so many neutral cards suporting it, despite the fact that only paladin and priest had dragon class cards at the time (thoug playing with dragon consort and droping a big scary dragon on turn 7 or 6 was alot of fun) we could still make dragon decks with other classes using the huge pool of neutral cards that suports dragons. Even after blackrock rotating, (while it was very hard and annoying) it was still possible to pull off non priest dragon decks (mainly druid) with netherspite historian and deathwing dragonlord (and I also tried dragon, beast, murloc with paladin wich was fun but a bit to fast and doesnt sadly make alot of use of the BIG dragons that I am after).

But now that Kharazan and WOTOG soon rotating out, this feels like a bell ringing telling me to take my dragons to wild forever playing the same dragon cards over and over again.

Really all I wanted was dragons to be available for everyone and I understand that im in the minority (and I understand that im posting this comment in the middle of nowhere and that it wont reach blizzard) but I really feel like if they used the same design the experimented with paladin and warrior (dragon consort and alexstraszas champion) and simillarly made just one dragon suport class card for every class but priest . Ofcourse I want priest to continue to get dragon suport and that when it comes to priest it just goes as normal but for the rest of the classes I wan’t 1 single dragon suport card that has to hold the rest of the deck but being able to do so very well (like alex champ being a 2 mana 3/3 with charge for warrior and dragon consort being a 5 mana 5/5 oldschool innervating the next dragon). I also want there to be more neutral dragon suport and I dont want that to die out.

But enough of me rambling here, nobody is probably reading this but if you are then… thank you?

I think Blizzard’s response would be that they want to take things in different directions with each expansion and not have a dragon deck in every class in every meta forever. I think they’d also say that dragons are a part of the priest class identity which they like to push to make the classes different so there shouldn’t always be class support cards.

This is a no-brainer, straight up ridiculous. Dragon priest will almost certainly be at least a tier 2 deck, purely carried alone by this card. Auto include in every priest deck that runs a few dragons. Don’t think raza priest will play it unless the list gets heavily modified towards more dragons, but i think that would lower the consistency of it, since you want to draw more draw, or your combo pieces. Perhaps if dragon soul turns out to be a really good card it will be included in those lists as well. Anyway this card is nuts, expect to see a lot of it.

This card is nuts. Warlock is supposed to be the class with tons of great board clears, but slowly priest is beginning to do warlock things better than warlock. This is basically hellfire with a 3/3 body.

I wouldn’t really say Warlock has a whole lot of “great” board clears. They all hurt yourself or need a ton of thought poured into them like Defile, and even then you can’t really play them in Zoolock outside of Shadowflame anyway.
I can see Priest encroaching on Warlocks class identity some, but it seems like the former will usually only have one good AOE card at a time with the first being Lightbomb succeeded by Dragonfire Potion, which is rotating out in March or April. I’d say this is just their one right now, but it is a good one.